A powerful indictment of Indian democracy by the Booker Prize-winning novelist and activist.
By Arundhati Roy
New Statesman
"....The Trickledown Revolution
....
On the sixty-fourth anniversary of India's Independence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh climbed into his bullet-proof soap box in the Red Fort to deliver a passionless, bone-chillingly banal speech to the nation. Listening to him, who would have guessed that he was addressing a country that, despite having the second highest economic growth rate in the world, has more poor people than 26 of Africa's poorest countries put together? "All of you have contributed to India's success" he said, "the hard work of our workers, our artisans, our farmers has brought our country to where it stands today... We are building a new India in which every citizen would have a stake, an India which would be prosperous and in which all citizens would be able to live a life of honor and dignity in an environment of peace and goodwill. An India in which all problems could be solved through democratic means. An India in which the basic rights of every citizen would be protected." Some would call this graveyard humor. He might as well have been speaking to people in Finland, or Sweden.
If our Prime Minister's reputation for 'personal integrity' extended to the text of his speeches, this is what he should have said: "Brothers and sisters, greetings to you on this day on which we remember our glorious past. Things are getting a little expensive I know, and you keep moaning about food prices. But look at it this way -- more than six hundred and fifty million of you are engaged in and are living off agriculture as farmers and farm labor, but your combined efforts contribute less than eighteen percent of our GDP. So what's the use of you? Look at our IT sector. It employs 0.2 percent of the population and earns us thirty four percent of our national income. Can you match that? It is true that in our country employment hasn't kept pace with growth, but fortunately sixty percent of our workforce is self-employed. Ninety percent of our labor force is employed by the unorganized sector. True, they manage to get work only for a few months in the year, but since we don't have a category called 'underemployed', we just keep that part a little vague. It would not be right to enter them in our books as unemployed. Coming to the statistics that say we have the highest infant and maternal mortality in the world -- we should unite as a nation and ignore bad news for the time being. We can address these problems later, after our Trickledown Revolution, when the health sector has been completely privatized. Meanwhile, I hope you are all buying medical insurance. As for the fact that the per capita food grain availability has actually decreased over the last twenty years -- which happens to be the period of our most rapid economic growth -- believe me, that's just a coincidence......"
By Arundhati Roy
New Statesman
"....The Trickledown Revolution
....
On the sixty-fourth anniversary of India's Independence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh climbed into his bullet-proof soap box in the Red Fort to deliver a passionless, bone-chillingly banal speech to the nation. Listening to him, who would have guessed that he was addressing a country that, despite having the second highest economic growth rate in the world, has more poor people than 26 of Africa's poorest countries put together? "All of you have contributed to India's success" he said, "the hard work of our workers, our artisans, our farmers has brought our country to where it stands today... We are building a new India in which every citizen would have a stake, an India which would be prosperous and in which all citizens would be able to live a life of honor and dignity in an environment of peace and goodwill. An India in which all problems could be solved through democratic means. An India in which the basic rights of every citizen would be protected." Some would call this graveyard humor. He might as well have been speaking to people in Finland, or Sweden.
If our Prime Minister's reputation for 'personal integrity' extended to the text of his speeches, this is what he should have said: "Brothers and sisters, greetings to you on this day on which we remember our glorious past. Things are getting a little expensive I know, and you keep moaning about food prices. But look at it this way -- more than six hundred and fifty million of you are engaged in and are living off agriculture as farmers and farm labor, but your combined efforts contribute less than eighteen percent of our GDP. So what's the use of you? Look at our IT sector. It employs 0.2 percent of the population and earns us thirty four percent of our national income. Can you match that? It is true that in our country employment hasn't kept pace with growth, but fortunately sixty percent of our workforce is self-employed. Ninety percent of our labor force is employed by the unorganized sector. True, they manage to get work only for a few months in the year, but since we don't have a category called 'underemployed', we just keep that part a little vague. It would not be right to enter them in our books as unemployed. Coming to the statistics that say we have the highest infant and maternal mortality in the world -- we should unite as a nation and ignore bad news for the time being. We can address these problems later, after our Trickledown Revolution, when the health sector has been completely privatized. Meanwhile, I hope you are all buying medical insurance. As for the fact that the per capita food grain availability has actually decreased over the last twenty years -- which happens to be the period of our most rapid economic growth -- believe me, that's just a coincidence......"
The crisis of Indian democracy (part 2)
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